Buffy, Season 7 Disc 2

The episode starts out panning through what looks like a fraternity house. There are bodies everywhere. Looks like they all have holes in their chests too. There’s blood everywhere, of course. Then we see Anya sitting there covered in blood. Elbows deep, even. She looks absolutely miserable too. She then goes and tries to wash some of the blood off. The next thing we see is Willow running into her on her way out of the frat house. Willow notices a bit of blood on her, so when Anya leaves, Willow goes in to check out the house. She finds the massacre, and also finds the girl who made the wish for it whimpering in a closet about wanting to take everything back. Willow almost gets attacked by the spider demon that was unleashed to do all that damage, but manages to throw it out of the house instead.

D’Hoffryn: (to Willow) The flaying of Warren Mears? Oh, truly inspired. That was water-cooler vengeance. Lloyd has a sketch of it on his wall.

Willow goes back to tell her pals about what she’s seen and heard. Buffy and Xander go out to catch the spidery bugger pronto. During which, they have a conversation about how Buffy now has to kill Anya. Xander, being Anya’s ex-fiance, takes issue with this. He wants her to find another way.

Throughout the episode, we see flashbacks to Anya’s original past as a human and what drove her to become a vengeance demon in the first place. Her name was Aud back then and her man Olaf cheated on her. She cast some spell on him making him a troll, and then D’Hoffryn came a-knockin’ cuz he was so impressed with her act of vengeance.

Back in the present, Buffy confronts Anya sword-style. They fight, Anya gets stabbed right through the chest. They show a weird flashback from the musical episode, but this was a song we didn’t hear then. Something about her being excited to be a “Mrs.”Â She then wakes back up with the sword sticking out of her chest and then pulls it out. Guess it’s not so easy to get rid of her. Then D’Hoffryn appears and Anya says she wants to take it all back. He tells her the price is the soul of a vengeance demon, and she says she’s willing to pay. The problem here is he didn’t say that she would be the one paying. He pops up her vengeance demon friend Hallie, and kills her, and everything returns to normal. Also because of this, D’Hoffryn doesn’t want her as a vengeance demon anymore, and she’s back to being human. And if she’s human, Buffy don’t kill that. So… she’s off the hook now it would seem. Well, now she’s all sad and remorseful though.

Not an awful episode. I really like the way the Aud flashbacks are filmed. Weird grainy thing going on and with subtitles. It just seemed very Anya. Very different from the usual Angel or Spike flashbacks. It was quite sad to see Anya be so miserable, but then again we really wouldn’t have wanted her to continue on the show if she didn’t show such remorse. I guess her (relatively) short stint as a human changed her to where she just couldn’t bear the destruction she had to inflict on others.

7×06 Him

Ok, so we go from a kind of heavy episode, what with the attempt at killing Anya and at all that… and we move on to quite a funny episode. I was laughing my ass off during this episode. Hoooboy. So, Dawn gets what seems like a normal teenage crush on Sunnydale High’s star quarterback, RJ Brooks. However, it then turns into something quite obsessive, which leads Buffy to investigate the boy herself. That turns out to be a problem too, cuz then Buffy starts to develop a thing for him. She’s all over him in fact. Dawn witnesses how far it gets, and Xander manages to stop it before it goes too out of control. Dawn is crushed by Buffy’s betrayal and with the man Dawn so deeply loves.. suddenly. As the Gang investigates, all the girls become quite enamored with RJ. So, it is then up to Spike and Xander to discover the source of this attraction.

Buffy: Willow, you’re a gay woman. And he isn’t!Willow: This isn’t about his physical presence. It’s about his heart.Anya: His physical presence has a penis!Willow: I can work around it!

Turns out it is his letterman’s jacket. It was passed to him from his older brother, who Xander had gone to school with in the past, and his older brother got it from their father. They didn’t even seem to think anything was special about it. Only, that after the older brother no longer had it, the best thing that ever happened to him was getting in the manager program at the local pizzeria.

Ok, the really super funny bits was when all the girls are arguing about how much they love RJ and who loves him most. Then they decide they have to do something to prove how much they love RJ. It breaks down like so… Buffy says she’ll kill the principal for him cuz he was giving RJ a hard time earlier… Willow is going to do a spell to make him a girl, cuz yanno, gay… Dawn is going to kill herself to prove for now and always she will have loved him most… and Anya just runs off and robs a few banks apparently. Not sure where the last one comes from, but whatever floats.

The really funny part was when Spike finds Buffy outside the principal’s office with a bazooka. They have the shot from inside the principal’s office, so we just see them through the blinds. Spike interrupts her, then we see her running away from him. Then we see her running back to try to do the deed, and that happens a couple times. Then Spike is finally able to tackle her. I just couldn’t stop laughing. It’s also quite funny that Buffy is able to believe that all the other girls are under a spell and she feels so sorry for them, cuz her love is so real for RJ. Just a really fun episode, that happens to be sandwiched between too very serious ones.

7×07 Conversation With Dead People

All the gang is confronted by deceased people of some degree or another. Buffy squares off, physically and mentally, against former classmate Holden Webster, who has just risen as a vampire. It ends up being this big psych session with Holden, as he was a psych major at Dartmouth or somewhere fancy schmancy like that. It was a very good way to get a lot of info about how Buffy feels. Also, the dialogue between them was awesome. They would go back and forth from shrink sessions to trying to kill each other and the juxtaposition was great. In the end, he tells her that Spike was her sire.

Back at the Summers house, Dawn is terrorized by an unseen force, while Willow is visited in the library by the ghost of Cassie Newton, who says she’s been sent by Tara.

Holden: Oh, so I’m a vampire. How weird is that?Buffy: Sorry.Holden: No, no. Feels great. Strong. Like I’m connected to a powerful all-consuming evil that’s gonna suck the world into a fiery oblivion. How ’bout you?

Back at the Summers house, Dawn is terrorized by an unseen force. She tries to do spells to cast it out, and otherwise get rid of it. She also suspects her mother is trying to get through to tell her something. In the end, her mother does show up and tell her that something big is coming and Buffy will not choose her in the end. That’s just mean. What kind of mom would tell their daughter that? Dead or alive?

Willow is visited in the library by the ghost of Cassie Newton from a couple episodes back. She says she’s been sent by Tara. Willow is so amazed and emotional about this encounter, until Cassie goes a little too far. She starts to try to convince Willow to never use any sort of magic ever again. She then goes a step further and says it would really be better for the world, for Willow, and for Tara if she were to just kill herself. Willow finally realizes something is not quite right here.

We also see Spike, sans dialogue, at a bar chatting up a girl. Then we see them walking the streets just lahdeedah-like. Then we see him get her to her door, but just before she goes in, he bites her, drinks her up, does the neck tango, etc. Then, we see him bury her somewhere. Uhoh. Maybe soulful Spike is not so good afterall… eeep.

7×08 Sleeper

After battling a new vampire who claimed to have been recently sired by Spike, Buffy warns the gang that they must keep a close eye on him. Since Spike is now living at Xander’s place, Buffy keeps him in charge of Spike-watch. But since Xander has a job, where he’s been dressing in a suit (!!!), he enlists Anya to stay at his apartment to make sure Spike doesn’t do anything crazy. And since Anya is involved, we do get quite the hilarious scene here.

After a whole day of just sitting around, Anya finally gets curious and heads into Spike’s room while he’s sleeping. She’s trying to find anything that might indicate he’s gone bad. So, she starts going through his clothes, while holding a stake for protection of course. He finally wakes up while she’s digging through his jacket, and she plays it off like she came in there looking for sex. I don’t know what was funnier, Anya’s hilarious attempt at seeming hot and bothered, or Spike’s look of horror at the fact.

Anya: (to Spike) It’s not like I’m snooping around for proof that you’re some sort of whacked-out serial killer. I don’t know why I said that. Forget I said that. It’s craziness talking, it’s just nerves. Nerves. Nerves and horniness. Oh, just shut up, William, and take me. Take me now.

Afterwards, Spike does go out but he seems to fall into a weird trance and then seduces and attacks a girl as the weird First Evil thing looks on. Then Spike starts to remember everything that’s happened. He gets Buffy and takes her to where all the bodies are. Right after he gets her there, all the bodies he’s buried suddenly and conveniently all rise together and start attacking her. He goes off to a corner to mutter to himself and cry. When Buffy finally slays all the vamps, she comes back to Spike looking ready to kill him. He also looks quite ready to be killed. But as he has a bit of a conversation with the First, she begins to see that he is being tormented by the thing that has been taunting all of them too.

Spike: You know I can’t.Buffy: Right. The Chip.Spike: No, not the chip. Not the chip dammit. You honestly think I’d go to the end of the underworld and back to get my soul and then– Buffy, I can barely live with what I did. It haunts me. All of it. If you think that I would add to the body count now, you’re crazy.

Crazy Spike is not nearly as much fun as S&M Sexy Spike from last season, even if you just consider it all from a dialogue perspective. But of course, I’m also thinking of the fact that he was like half-naked half of the time in the previous season.

Back to the story… In London, Giles finds a young girl dead and a fellow watcher close to death. Just as the episode is ending we see one of those robed, hooded figures start to swing an ax thing at Giles’ head. Cruel, cruel way to end an episode. Mean! Dammit!